221–230 of 573 posts
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What’s to gain other than $400M in savings every year indeed? If it drops all the way to the bottom line, that would boost their 2022 profits by 35% and 2021 profits by about 45%. Seems like a decision you have to consider, even with possible failure modes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx Wikipedia says their net profit for 2021 was $75 billion, so your math seems off.
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That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…
1000% this. HN loves to talk about Dropbox. I spent most of my (short, praise God) career at Dropbox diagnosing a fleet of dodgy database servers we bought from HPE. Turns out they were full of little flecks of metal inside. Thousands of em, full of iron filings. You think that kind of thing happens when you are an AWS customer? If you are sophisticated enough to engage an ODM, build your own facilities, and put hvac…
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> For example FedEx flies Boeing jets. It's completely reliant on Boeing for parts for those jets. Presumably Boeing can charge whatever it wants. Nobody said that FedEx should build their own server hardware. And that's what you are comparing it too. FedEx could just buy server appliances from e.g. Dell (buying the Boeing jet) and operating it. Because paying some other air cargo company will eat a lot of their marg…
I'm simplifying here, but it feels to me like you are making the assumption that FedEx is a mostly static business, whose IT needs should be all about minimizing the cost per IO or compute operation. In the real world, business needs are rarely static, and moving fast and innovating is extremely valuable, even for a company as large as FedEx. They are choosing to move resources from managing their IT infra to AWS, bu…
I believe the self hosted options generally offer vastly more flexibility and can innovate at a faster pace. But only FedEx will know if it is a good decision, perhaps their infrastructure was indeed not competitive. But I heavily doubt they will save 400m in the long run.
AWS support is actually awesome and you usually get responsive within a day, even smaller businesses. But cloud hosting is only useful for certain scenarios. In this case it is Azure and I believe Microsoft currently innovates far slower than Amazon. Of course Amazon could be a direct competitor to FedEx in a few years too given they do more an more logistics. If they aren't a competitor already. In this context I would understand the decision to close their data centers because it is hard to compete with Amazon in the cloud space... a computing alliance with Microsoft would make sense.
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The immediate gains I can see are: * In-house development teams have more agility in standing up new services, since they can just use EC2/ECS/one of the other 1500 container runtimes AWS has, rather than having to wait for someone to provision new physical servers for them. * An extensive suite of complementary products are available from cloud providers, it's not just about being able to start a VM, in many cases y…
> In-house development teams have more agility in standing up new services, since they can just use EC2/ECS/one of the other 1500 container runtimes AWS has, rather than having to wait for someone to provision new physical servers for them. How many people run physical servers 'raw' anymore? I would hazard their current stack involves VMware, Hyper-V, Open Stack, or a combination of the three. You can have an API sys…
Not saying it can't be done well but there's less incentive for a company whose main business isn't providing infrastructure to ensure they've provisioned enough resources to meet demand.
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There's not a company in the world that spends more than $1m annually on cloud costs that has saved money by doing so. You don't go to the cloud to save money, you go to the cloud to reduce technological risk. If you go to the cloud you don't need to fire anyone for choosing IBM, you're not getting strangled by any Oracle contracts, you're not gonna lose all your data because of security holes in your use of Microsof…
>You're also not going to be dealing with downtime because you couldn't find staff talented off to properly configure your Cisco networking equipment. >Your system administrators department is not gonna block any innovative employee initiatives because of the strain maintaining more projects puts on a deployment stack carrying 150 different projects but which was architected to solve a single business goal 15 years a…
Its weird to have companies say they're moving from Mainframes to the Cloud. The Mainframe is a sort of cloud, each one has usually double the spare capacity and you call IBM to unlock it. The cost of running a Mainframe is measured in terms of MIPS based on amount of compute used and there's compute reserved for offloading things like JITs (zAAPS). Essentially a version of cloud compute costs. I can understand if yo…
Mainframe = locked in to IBM, is probably the logic.
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That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…
To a company you need to pay those costs no matter what. If the AC breaks at 3am it neds to be fixed. It doesn't matter if you have your own HVAC people on sight 24x7, your own people on call to service it, a local HVAC service to come in, or you outsource the entire operations and so you have no idea how that is handled. In the end the important part of this story is that whatever you are doing with the AC continues…
Now I'm deeply confused. Any company hired either has a profit margin (plus enough to fund an "Oh shit" fund in case times turn bad) or will not stick around longer than a few years. At which case why not just hire people directly and cut out the other company's profit margin? Assuming you hire similar people at the same rate, using your own existing and already-paid-for HR, how is that not cheaper?
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Fedex will continue to charge as much as they can to boost their profits. This move will increase their profits, making $1.50 on each of 100 million deliveries instead of $1, boosting profits from $100m to $150m However if they were to undercut UPS and others they might be able snap up UPS business, dropping the profit to $1, but on 200 million deliveries, and thus they'll make $200m instead, you the customer will ha…
Until it becomes a race to the bottom and UPS drop their prices as well. Then both companies suffer
It fails when you get high barriers to entry and company colluding
https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-americas-350-million...